Buy Or Don’t Buy

Muxtapes are more or less digital mixtapes. Users can add about two dozen songs at a time and they are free to listen to. When I first heard of digital mixtapes, I just rolled my eyes and vowed never to visit that site.

That was until a friend of mine sent me a link and told me to listen to a song from some stranger’s muxtape. I did. I also listened to the other songs on there. And from there, I found a new tool to listen to favorites and related new music. While I am at work and don’t really want to just put my iPod on shuffle, I’ll find a new muxtape to listen to by using muxtapestumbler. It turns out that muxtape and muxtapestumbler were my saving grace for the boring 8-5 work days.

Now there are positives and negatives to the muxtapes. People still suck, in fact, a lot of people suck, which in turn make lots of lots of sucky muxtapes. But there are a few that if you stumble upon that are really fantastic. I got into funk due to funcupcake. Another positive is that with an account on muxtape you can have all the tracks you listen to show up on your last.fm account. Another negative is that muxtape only allows a user to have one muxtape at a time. So that favorite muxtape of yours can easily disappear on a creator’s whim.

You may be thinking to yourself why is this relevant? Well, muxtape is down. When you visit muxtape.com today you will be greeted with this message:

Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.

That message is a brave and seemingly upbeat one. In reality though, muxtape is not alone in this conflict with music services. Pandora is being threatened as well. Now, while I buy these free Internet services, I don’t buy the bullying from these larger puppet master hands. I want to help out, for my sake and the sake of many others, to get these free music generators back online.

Without muxtapes, how will a Gen Y express their feelings to other Gen Y’s??